Green Colorized Mold SEM Image

Click HERE to vote for my design! (username = StargazunDesigns, picture is the one below, right)


I've been eyeing Spoonflower.com for a while now waiting to figure out what I want to create for my first fabric.  A couple of days ago I noticed that the weekly contest for this week was Microorganisms.  My husband just started his own SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope) rental business so I figured this was a sign to get myself in gear and try to lay out my first fabric.  After going through a number of my husbands pictures I decided on trying to use this image he took with his new microscope as my inspiration.  We've gotten images of a number of different types of mold but I thought this one was particularly interesting (and I also think the spores look like little coffee beans).  The images are all taken in greyscale and I added in additional color with Photoshop.  To make this image into a step an repeat I cut out individual spores in Photoshop, created vector images out of each in Illustrator and kept adding and arranging them until I had a pattern.  I found that I felt like my Illustrator images were coming out as desired but when I uploaded the files to Spoonflower I had trouble getting the colors/design to look the same.  In my first attempt, the "mold beans" somehow became neon green when uploaded to Spoonflower. I also felt like a lot of the detail in the original image was lost too. I created a TIF as my first file format so the conversion from a vector image should have already happened before it was uploaded. (Left = TIF, Right = After Upload)

I had tried a number of different exports (formats and settings) and eventually found that the least amount of change happened when I darkened the image a bit (which I think is really what helped it) and exported as a jpg file. Its still not as good as my original but much better.  (Left = JPG, Right = After Upload)

SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope) Photoshop Colorized Mold Images

My husband just launched his own Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) rental business a couple of months ago. He works at his full time job with SEMs and so I've been exposed to some of the images before but anything he took was technically owned by his company. 

His new microscope takes black and white images up to 45,000 times zoomed in by shooting electrons at the sample.  It also can tell you what elements the sample is made of by collecting X-rays.

To tell the truth the whole process baffles me but what I do know is that the pictures are absolutely fascinating blank canvases.  I took some of the more interesting ones and learned how to artificially color them in Photoshop. Here are some of the pictures of typical food mold that I've colored.